Hi All,
Welcome to Alphaday 7. Isn’t it strange that we’ve already worked our way through one half of Season X? Six Alphadays either side of today and five out of ten challenges dusted off so far…
There are suitable clichés for the occasion: ‘Time flies’ (very banal), ‘Time and tide wait for no man’ (sexist, but otherwise good). I’m sure there are others, and perhaps Zena, our quotation expert, could suggest a few. The gist of it is that there’s plenty happening on the Alpha front and we need to make the most of it while we can: Oh, ‘carpe diem’ of course. And don’t forget: ‘The glass is still half full’.
I’ve bombarded you with clichés because I can’t think of any brilliant original expressions. But we are a busy group and most of us don’t want to miss a thing, even when ‘life generally’ gets in the way. And we let it, because after all…
So let’s start on the 2nd half of this season. There’s a great line-up of Alpha treats to study, work on and comment on.
Here’s the Alphaday 7 agenda:
- This bulletin from me
- The Log from Margie
- The results of the quotation challenge from Zena
- The collated entries for the poetry challenge from Christine (standing in for Kim)
- The brief for Challenge 7 from Rosemary
- The steady flow of Alpha showpieces from Clare (with its own timetable)
That should provide plenty of opportunities for the pleasurable pursuit of practising our penmanship. (I ‘pologise!)
We’ve had no real debates yet this year. I can only think of a very ‘old hat’ subject that came to mind when I disapproved of a sentence I wrote in an email: “One member has informed me they’ll be unable to enter.”
I’ll take the opportunity to point out that it’s really helpful for a challenge organiser to be informed if you can’t enter. So let’s make a habit of this and make the challenge organiser’s life a bit less stressful.
As for the prickly he/she problem I’d have been much happier if the English language had allowed me to say, “One member has informed me it’ll be unable to enter.” No doubt I’d only get a snigger for that, and there’s still no better option available than to use a plural pronoun despite the grammatical number clash. It’s a pity, because it’s aesthetically obnoxious.
They say you should write about what you know. The Costa Prize for a first novel has just been awarded to Nathan Filer, a 32-year-old mental health nurse from Bristol who did just that. (Did you ever meet him, Fran?)
I was listening to Radio 4 recently and they mentioned Angela Carter who most likely did not write from personal experience. Her horror stories based on fairy tales were nevertheless something she knew about from her extensive reading. So ‘what you know’ seems to be just as slippery an entity as the length of a piece of string.
Angela Carter also has a Bristol connection. She took her degree in English Literature at Bristol University. She was before my time, but I’m convinced some of the professors who taught her were still there when I was a Bristol undergraduate. I have a sneaky feeling they wouldn’t have been her greatest admirers. Following the programme I listened to, I’ve now re-read the stories in The Bloody Chamber and I’ve become a great fan of hers.
Which just goes to show that long-held opinions are sometimes slippery entities as well.